Thoughts on politics, law, culture and guns from an eclectic, but mainly center-right point of view

Friday, May 03, 2013

The Answer is No

Political consultant and early Obama supporter Joe McLean writes a piece today with the headline: GOP, ready to turn your back on the NRA? (and elsewhere the headline is: Will Gun Vote Come Back to Haunt Republicans? but the answer to that is the same as to Joe's question).

Mr. McLean points to a drop in some popularity polls for some Republican Senators, Murkowski, Portman and Heller. Even if the drop is real, do we know what caused it? Does Mr. McLean?

My little bit of "finger on the pulse" in the political realm in Colorado tells me that the guys opposing "knee jerk" useless gun "safety" legislation are not the worse for their opposition. The public opinion is that new gun legislation just doesn't matter.

But here is a bit of the article I want to highlight. McLean quotes a question to Sen Kelly Ayotte as if it were profound and meaningful.

Erica Lafferty, whose mother, Dawn Hochsprung, was the principal at Sandy Hook and among the first to be gunned down, asked Ayotte,
"You had mentioned that day the burden on owners of gun stores that the
expanded background checks would harm. I am just wondering why the
burden of my mother being gunned down in the halls of her elementary
school isn't more important than that."

As tragic and unexplainable as the shooting at Sandy Hook was, expanded background checks would have done nothing to prevent the horrible murder of Ms. Lafferty's mother. The evil psychopath who shot her mother, and 25 others before he self executed, killed his mother to steal her guns (which she passed background checks to obtain) to use for his atrocity. There was nothing in the Senate bill which failed which asked gun buyers: "Do you have an incipient psychopath at home who might murder you to obtain this weapon?" The main reason the gun control bills failed in the Senate was not the fear of the NRA but that the bills were useless, meaningless monuments to our sadness over the murder of so many innocents. Let's just do the physical monument instead and burden the law abiding, the only ones who would follow new laws, not at all. It is an enumerated right in the Constitution to keep and bear arms and the prohibition on the government is not to ban guns but not to infringe (in any way) on that right.

I propound the modest proposal that the gun bills failed in the Senate because enough Senators to block the new legislation didn't want to pass unconstitutional legislation. It makes them look foolish.